r/aiwars

Let's talk about the loud anti-AI crowd who claim they're "fighting corporations" and "protecting artists."

In reality, they disproportionately bully small creators, solo devs, hobbyists, students, and indies. The pattern is clear and toxic.

Recent example

Party Animals (fun physics brawler with "Very Positive" reviews). Devs announced the Golden Paw Awards – $75k prize pool for fan videos primarily made with AI. Goal: lower barriers so regular players could create without pro skills. Response? Nuclear review bombing. Steam flipped to Mostly Negative in hours. Mass refunds. Pile-ons. Devs canceled the contest after a community vote. Another studio scared straight. This wasn't devs replacing their game assets. It was an optional community contest. Yet the mob treated it like a war crime.

Same story with

Solo dev Eero “Rakuel” Laine pulling his game Hardest after "soulless AI art" complaints.

Indies like Shrine’s Legacy review-bombed over false AI accusations.

Small teams facing witch hunts on Steam and socials. Even schools get hit as parents/students launch petitions and outrage campaigns over AI-generated yearbook covers or backgrounds (while real student photos stay). "This should be illegal!" "Wasted water!" Real art only!

Soft targets with no PR teams = easy wins for the mob.

Meanwhile? Disney, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, and big Hollywood quietly build massive AI tools (often trained on everything). They face articles and hand-wringing.

No sustained review bombing. No career-ending pile-ons. Because the "wins" I see fir antis at best against way smaller companies than these guys.

The tactics:

Coordinated review bombing (ruining Steam scores meant for gameplay).

False accusations (human art mistaken for AI).

Dogpiling, harassment, shame campaigns.

Turning "dislike the tool" into "destroy the creator."

This isn't "criticism" or "boycott." It's economic and social sabotage against people who can't fight back.

Real creativity suffers when experimentation is punished. Indies and hobbyists benefit most from AI productivity tools. Gatekeeping via bullying doesn't protect artists as nothing literally ever changes after doing these mob events that isn’t act of protecti for changes but just bullying and punching down over over and thinking change will happen.

You can dislike AI. You can choose not to use it or buy it. But stop bullying small creators over tool choices.

The big guys laugh while the little ones get crushed.

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will have to adjust the colors, change where the pupils are, and add it back to the original image so I'm not done yet. Is there enough soul yet? I'm having fun with it so no suffering so far. Am I in your special club yet? I used krita for the drawing. does anyone know anything better than Krita that's free?

Is it "art"? Is it "slop"?

For example https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-omni/

Of course, how much adding images and videos improves the AI itself is a debatable topic, but it can notice that video and text improve quite significantly, so the opposite should also be true.

A Shenzhen police drone hovers over traffic and tells drivers: "Your illegal act has been videotaped and collected."

The drone is seen working a bus lane on Shennan Middle Road, ordering vehicles to leave and confirming their violation has already been recorded. Then it moves to a busy junction and warns cyclists to wear helmets, tells people not to run red lights, and announces that illegal parking will be caught.

My personal take: AI used in surveillance is unethical and dangerous, I've fought and argued this point multiple times. Regulations preventing a mass surveillance state should be instituted before it happens.

Edit: China heavily integrates AI-powered drones and robots into its policing and public surveillance infrastructure. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely utilized across the country such as in Sichuan and Guangdong provinces to autonomously monitor highway traffic, record violations, manage event crowds, and assist in high-security operations like the annual Gaokao exams.

https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/chinas-ai-powered-surveillance-state

Interested this earlier as a comment and decided it deserved its own post

People are all upset about the water use when it comes to AI and data centers. They say even if AI doesn't steal and even if it's used appropriately, why would you want to use a tool that increases water costs and takes water away from people's homes?

But the thing is it doesn't do those things

AI does not really increase water costs - it's a skapegoat for bad municipal water management. When people go for the lowest bidder for public services like water because they want to cut taxes, The water problems that people are describing are what you get. But it's not because of AI

Let me give you some perspective

All data centers - all of them - in the US they use about 449 million gallons of water a day

That gives you corporate cloud services, streaming video (both already a much bigger user of data centers than AI), and the backbone of the Internet itself, and then also AI, with online gaming in the mix too

449 million gallons seems like a lot doesn't it? Nearly half a billion.

Now let's look at the American lawn:

9 billion gallons a day! That's billion with a b! Lawns use about 18 times the amount of water that all data centers combined use, much less AI.

So for about 1/18 the usage of people having patches of grass in front of and behind their homes you get cloud services, streaming video, the Internet, AI, and online gaming - that's a pretty good deal if you ask me

Edit: this post got more attention than I expected. I've been trying to respond to most of the comments but I'm not going to be able to maintain at this volume so hopefully the rebuttals I've already made continue to frame the issue

Why can’t we exist together?

Why does every conversation about AI art immediately become people attacking each other instead of actually listening to one another?

I genuinely understand why many artists are worried about plagiarism, exploitation, theft, and corporations abusing AI. Those concerns are real and should be taken seriously.

But I also think it’s wrong to instantly bully, mock, or dehumanize every normal person using AI creatively for harmless things like storytelling, worldbuilding, emotional expression, experimentation, or personal projects.

Not everybody using AI wants to replace artists.
Not everybody using AI is malicious.
Not everybody using AI is anti-art.

And on the pro-AI side, people also need to stop defending obvious theft, plagiarism, deception, and disrespect toward artists, because that behavior hurts everyone and makes the conversation worse.

At the end of the day, art has always evolved alongside new tools and new mediums.

Why can’t there simply be room for all of us?

but then you remember that that's not possible to be in a museum because only pro ai are filthy gooners according to reddit.

(I'm not sure if this should go under discussion, sorry mods)

You know we may be different but we all know that creating an AI that can get smarter with time (so it could become sentient) is a bad idea since it'll probably go rougue and rebel against us, you know like GLaDOS, AM, HAL 9000, Wheatly and many more